


A Visual Flower Language

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Psychonauts (Video Games)
Genre: Hopeful Ambivalence, Moving On, Post-Canon, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24366058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Edgarknowshe saw a familiar face at one of his gallery shows.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	A Visual Flower Language

That had been her at the show.

He knew it was statistically unlikely, but sensory impressions don’t go away. She’d looked like she was about the right age - it had been about fifty years now since he’d last seen her - but how it had looked like her! Same eye shape, he swore. Long legs in a long, ruffled dark pink skirt. Long, wavy brown hair - a bit thinner and a bit grayer than hers had been. Long neck, like a heron.

And he’d caught eye contact with her once. Her lips had twitched - a tell? - and then she’d looked away.

He wasn’t proud of it - shouldn’t have done it, for his own sake, turned his attention fully back to the showing and brushed it off as a looked-like - but he’d slipped here and there in the gallery to take a peek at her position around the corners. Either he’d been doing well at being sneaky - not a thing which was easy for him to do - or she’d been pretending not to see him, which made it all the easier for him to keep looking. He’d made a few obligatory assumptions about why she’d be there, simultaneously hoping and dreading she’d talk to him, to “catch up”, or apologize, and at the prospect, he hadn’t felt smaller since he was eighteen.

She had stopped by the door midway through the day, standing straight with her arms crossed over her stomach, scanning back and forth across the entryway. He’d almost started stepping forward to get it - ask if it was Lana Panzoni, ask her what had brought her there - when her brows had lifted, the corners of her lips had darted up into a faint, awkward smile, and she’d taken the arm of a man. Edgar hadn’t recognized him - part of him had avoided looking. Then she’d left. The air behind her had smelled of rosy perfume.

It had been the last day of the show, which Edgar had eventually been thankful for later. He’d genuinely felt it had all been over throughout the previous two days, chatting up guests and flourishing with celebratory pride to ratty scraps of a weary past restored to something absurd but beautiful on his black velvet canvases. He’d actually kept a couple of the bullfight paintings, thanks to sufficient mental distance from them to appreciate how good they’d turned out - dramatic composition, features just the right degree of grotesque for their mood - though he always avoided deep into discussing why he’d painted them. After she’d left, he couldn’t remember much of the last day - confused by stale melancholy, he supposed. Couldn’t much remember what he’d said, if he had said anything in particular.

The next thing he knew, he was in the attic of Miss von Gouten’s manor. The blacklight was on. Dust motes floated around it like bruise-colored moths and the blank velvet canvas on his easel disappeared into the lack of light that deepened as the slope of the ceiling came close to the floor. Ultraviolet paints glowed in their cans on either side of the easel like glum, slow, other-planar flames in holding pits.

He stared at that canvas, crossing his arms with his brow furrowed, trying to make sense of the dark, asking the velvet what it wanted from him; uncrossing his arms, smoothing his beard, shaking his head, and walking slow, one way and then the other across his makeshift studio.

Pacing.

Wondering if he was really ready to paint roses again or if roses were something to be abandoned.

He knew which result he wanted - a piece of peaceful contemplation - but not which was the route that would take him there.


End file.
